The Cosmic Era doesn't have to suck.
This was originally distributed over the internet as three 15 minute episodes. The DVD cuts them all together as a single film, with a little watermark indicating when each part ends. For 2006, this is ambitious. Youtube's still in its first year and only allows uploads up to 5 minutes. At home we had recently upgraded to an ISDN connection with a whopping huge download speed of 14kbps. Much like how the main Cosmic Era TV shows were a testbed for digital animation techniques and production pipelines, so too was this more a test of distribution methods than making another War in the Pocket.
Even so, the three parts are all tightly focused on something. Episode 1 puts more care and thought into the immediate material consequences of Destiny's colony drop than any of its 50 episodes. So too does the closing stinger and second episode explore the ways both sides' systemic cruelty is siring generation after generation of alienated killers. With its final episode, we have a reminder of just how rampant anti-intellectualism is across the Atlantic Federation. At the same time, there's more hope for understanding and healing than anywhere else in this miserable, shitty setting.
There's a cute moment in the second episode when our team of scientists trying to build a fully sapient artificial intelligence decide it deserves a more human name than a unit number. You see a chatlog between the team and the AI where they bestow its new name of Stargazer, it recgonises this input and then retcons the entire chatlog to have always been named as such. Discussing one's identity before and after socially transitioning is often messy. Have I always been a girl? Was that something which changed one day? How do I talk about my childhood and the photos all over my parents' home? Some talk about their pre-transition self as a deceased sibling. Sometimes I do that as a joke but I do prefer the retcon. It's a fun neural experience to undergo and it helps me contextualise emotions and decisions made over the years. The Cosmic Era's so devoid of queerness most of the time that it was nice for a little web series to evoke some feelings. I try to use the most queer-coded frame from each show to use as the top image and it was a tough competition between Stargazer's retconned chatlog and what I went with.
Well, I'm a horrible little pervert. I went with the image like 60% of trans women I know would consider life goals.
Little projects like Stargazer are worth funding and producing. They give people a chance to flex their talents and potentially rise up to greater prominence as artists. That didn't really happen here. Everyone involved was part of the machinery which finished SEED Destiny's production but never really rose to become known auteurs. Sometimes a guy's just good at getting your storyboards done on time. Now to be fair, the fight storyboards here are better than anything in the previous 100 episodes of television. There's some real creativity to how all the tools available are used in their surroundings. There's an attention to detail that's been lacking after 50 episodes of watching that ZAKU fire a beam towards the camera, the suit recoloured depending on who's piloting it in the shot. We're much closer to the legacy of shows like Victory than we've been in a long time.
Does Stargazer really add much to the legacy of Gundam as a franchise? Not particularly. It's more a little treat for making it through 100 episodes of Mitsuo Fukuda and Chiaki Morosawa's terrible franchise-derailing garbage. Watch it if you've tortured yourself with those horrors or need a quick action fix.
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